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Matthew Stewart - Nature's God

Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - 7:00pm

Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of
American democracy? Not only the erudite Thomas Jefferson, the wily and elusive
Ben Franklin, and the underappreciated Thomas Paine, but also Ethan Allen, the
hero of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, the forgotten Founder who
kicked off the Boston Tea Party—these radicals who founded America set their
sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as “infidels” and “atheists” in
their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from one king but from the
tyranny of supernatural religion. The ideas that inspired them were neither
British nor Christian but largely ancient, pagan, and continental: the fecund
universe of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the potent (but
nontranscendent) natural divinity of the Dutch heretic Benedict de Spinoza.
Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Nature’s God: The Heretical
Origins of the American Republic pursues a genealogy of the philosophical ideas
from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration, all scrupulously
researched and documented and enlivened with storytelling of the highest order.

Matthew Stewart is the author of the books The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, andthe Fate of God in the Modern World and The Management Myth: Debunking the Modern Philosophy of Business. He lives in Boston, Massachuset

Not only the erudite Thomas Jefferson, the wily and elusive Ben Franklin, and the underappreciated Thomas Paine, but also Ethan Allen, the hero of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, the forgotten Founder who kicked off the Boston Tea Party these radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind.